PRESIDENT MAYER had completed less than a decade of association with Tufts when he made his annual report to the trustees in the fall of 1983 and announced that he had "achieved many of the objectives I set for the University in my Inaugural Address" and promised even greater accomplishment for the future.

A review of his administration up to that point indicated phenomenal changes in the most visible areas - in the number of educational centers, in bricks and mortar, and in the number of schools, colleges, and divisions. There had been two campuses when Wessell became president in 1953; thirty years later, there were four. On the Medford campus there had appeared the Cabot Intercultural Center, dominating the hilltop; the long-awaited Elizabeth van Huysen Mayer Campus Center; and two new dormitory complexes. In Boston, the Human Nutrition Research Center, built as a federal facility but managed by Tufts, had opened, and the Health Sciences Education Building (the Sackler Center for Health Communications) was nearing completion. On the Grafton campus, half a dozen new buildings were under construction or reconstruction, or planned. The priory at Talloires, France, was about to undergo extensive interior remodelling.

There were nine schools, colleges, and divisions making up Tufts in 1953, reduced to eight in 1968 with the closing of the Crane Theological School; in 1983, there were eleven, with the creation of the School of Veterinary Medicine, the School of Nutrition, and the Sackler Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. All of them were interdisciplinary in personnel and curriculum, and all contributed in some degree to the combination of research, teaching, and public service which Mayer saw as the responsibilities of the institution. As he said (and wrote) many times, Tufts had become "either the smallest complex university or the most complex small university in the country." He had made tangible progress in working out his grand plan

As Mayer pointed out in an interview only a few weeks after his accession to the presidency, "the challenge is to bring Tufts to the front rank as a research institution without compromising the excellence of the teaching and the quality of the relationship between the faculty and the students." He continued to insist on the uniqueness of Tufts as an educational institution, combining as it did the merits of an undergraduate college, with its emphasis on teaching, with the attributes of a true university, with its focus on productive scholarship. Thus he characterized Tufts as a "university college," with the dynamic confluence of and interaction between liberal education at the undergraduate level and professional preparation at the graduate level, all within a university environment.

"Grantsmanship" had become part of the working vocabulary of the institution during his administration. The number and amount of funded research projects set new records almost every year, and were broken almost as frequently. Mayer emphasized day in and day out that grants and contracts were "an important component of the financial and academic well-being of the University." The statistics were particularly impressive in view of the steady decline in funding opportunities at the national level.

Mayer had attracted widespread attention with his success in fund-raising. Above all, to use his own words, by 1983 "we [had] 'put Tufts on the map."' Mayer had actually built on the foundations laid by Leonard Carmichael, Nils Wessell, and Burton Hallowell. The institution, under the dynamic leadership of Mayer, had not only strengthened its position as a national institution but had begun to develop international connections and associations. In terms of institutional goals, he held staunchly to one that had been enunciated by a predecessor (John A. Cousens) more than half a century earlier. It was, in Mayer's words, to "retain our moderate size, and retain the intimacy and civility of a small university."

He also sought to strike a balance between the liberal arts tradition and professional education. In his annual report to the trustees in 1978, Mayer had had this to say:

Tufts was founded and grew as a college of liberal arts. Our fine undergraduate colleges still live at the heart of the University .... By emphasizing the importance of the arts, humanities and sciences as values in and of themselves, we should continue to prepare all our undergraduates for a role as useful citizens in a complex world, for work, and for leisure. In addition, it is fundamental that our

In the self-study published in the spring of 1982 for the reevaluation of the institution by the New England Association, the following assessment was included:

Likely the most significant change in the past decade has been the emergence of Tufts, out from the shadows of its sister institutions in Cambridge and Boston, to assume a role as a leader among regional institutions, as well as on the national and international scenes. The recognized excellence of the many Tufts research and educational programs; the active participation of faculty and administration in regional, national, and international conferences, symposia, and professional societies have been major factors contributing to this change. We can take pride in our past accomplishments and those of our students, alumni, and alumnae and look with optimism to the future.

In the quarter-century between the resignation of Leonard Carmichael in 1952 and the inauguration of Jean Mayer in 1976, Tufts continued to maintain itself as a self-governing and largely self-supporting institution. It determined its own academic leadership and philosophy, the nature and size of its programs, and the places and manner of its operation. As was pointed out by the Steering Committee appointed by President Hallowell in 1972 to assess the present and future Tufts, the institution had demonstrated over the years "a capacity for useful change .... The pattern of progress is one that few institutions can match: from commuter to residential, from local to national, from predominantly undergraduate to full university, from a teaching faculty to a teaching-and-research faculty, from basically conservative to flexible and forward-looking."

It was the destiny of President Mayer to make even more meaningful the assessments included in this quotation, and even to extend them into a vision of greatness.